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What we do

Software

Software is eating the world? Take a bite back.

  • Automation
  • Web Applications & API
  • Product Strategy
  • Interface Design
  • Mobile Development

Innovation

Uncover your blue ocean strategy.

  • Online Courses
  • Research
  • Ideation
  • Prototyping

Web & digital marketing

Get noticed online.

  • Web Development
  • SEO & Content Marketing
  • Analytics & Tracking
  • Ecommerce
  • Data analysis & insights

How to build a website - the 7 essential steps.

Step One: Planning

Every digital product is different, because every company is different. Different trends and different customers with different expections. The planning stage is very important to any products success, digital or not. This stage is often overlooked by most software companies. We spend a lot of time on this step, because it shapes everything that flows from it. Here are some common questions to consider. Who is the businesses customer? What they are looking for? What will turn them into a customer? What will keep them coming back? Why would they tell their friends? What words do they use? What words do they expect to see? What styles and colours do they associate this industry with? How will they find this website and how will they use it? What groups do are they belong to? Where can we find more of them? What motivates them? Once you dig deep into these topics, with a marketing & psychology hat on. You can come out of the cave with a very clear understanding that the shadows on the walls have depth. This allows us to figure out exactly who you customer is and why they should care about you. A little bit of extra time here sets our services part from anyone else.

Step Two: Design

People say dont judge a book by its cover, but people do anyway. The look and feel of your website leaves lasting impression and its up to you what impression you want to leave. We are talking about brand image. You want vistors to feel at ease, to trust you and your company, because they can always hit the back button. Picture this, you know the feeling when you walk into a nice cafe. Visually appealing, smells of cookies and clean places to sit. Staff members you want to learn the names of, the outdoor chairs of this cafe are both dry and bird poop free. Win. You will spend more money here, and come back more often. They own their space. They have taken control, their space is a reflection on of them as a person their company and its products. Your online presence in the same way is a reflection of your company. BWM will spend $100,000 on a simple marketing page. Yet some companies, typically small businesses, think a free website made by their nephew in high school will do the trick. A well designed website is a trust point, we as humans trust beautiful things. Design is very important to us here at thewolf, our process is simple. We sit with you and go through different website designs from companies around the world. To give you ideas of what is possible, you tell us what parts you like. We then build a mockup or wireframe showing where all the bits will go, to give you an idea of what the website will look and feel like. You give us the go ahead and we will start building it.

Step Three: Building

Building a website is complex, luckily we have done it a few times. We have a system in place that would take a normal person year or so to recreate. A normal programmer that is, it would take a normal person a few years on top of that to learn to code. Programmers are well paid, Google pays entry level, 20 year old, college grads $150,000 a year.. USD .. Having a system in place is important to reduce wasted time. Developer time is the largest variable cost of any software project. This is why we can charge the prices that we charge, a normal company would charge $80,000 for the same service, but we can charge $20k. Some companies worry that our are prices are too low. 'Why are you underquoting us?' they say. Thinking it might be a boeing 737 type situation, no we dont outsource or use slave labour. We are more productive because our systems are better. Building a website with any degree of interactivity is actually pretty hard. You have to consider layout, design, application logic, state management, server, database, sercurity, creditcard processing, email server, caching, cdn, image optimization, memory management, unit testing ... ect. Here is a step by step guide from google on how to set up a python server running a simple webapp. https://cloud.google.com /appengine/docs/standard/python3/ building-app writing-web-service. That is a simple step by step guide, where they hold your hand and tell you exactly what to do. We make this daunting task easy. We can build a website in a few weeks depending on the project. Because we have done it many times before. This step is where we build your website using the current best practices. Which change often, we keep up. Many don't and it affects their sales.

Step Four: Deploying

We believe in deploying early. This allows you the client to see whats going on and access the status of the project. How do things visually look, and this allows you to give their feedback along the way. It is also important to start tracking the numbers at this stage. Are the vistors responding in the way we planned? Our websites are hosted on Google's Cloud Platform, this means your website uses Googles private fiber lines and servers that span the globe. If that's not cool, I dont know what is.

Step Five: Maintaining

Any good website needs maintenance. It's a fact of life, we plan ahead and some of our packages include 5 hours a month development time, at a reduced price. Typically we will be adding features on request. Here are a few examples; 'Can you add a sign up form here?', 'I want to show my Instagram business account photos on the product page, can you do that?', 'I want to email my customers a special offer on their birthday', 'Can I send people an automatic text on morning of the job?' Stuff like that.

Step Six: Marketing, Analytics & SEO

There is no point having a flash new website when only your daughter and neighbours have seen it. You know what I mean? $20k down the drain? No. We plan for future success, some companies hand you the website and say good luck. I dont think that makes any sense, we are not running a churn and burn business model. We want your business to prosper, so naturaly we help you along the way. Getting a business online is only one part of internet success, you need people, real humans to go there. You need to attract vistors, convert vistors into customers, study the analytics, make some changes, study the analytics. Rank on Google - If you are not first you are last. Our websites are built on top of the line marketing and analytics software. Some built by us, and some built by the tech giants. We plan & manage your websites SEO or content marketing for our premium customers. For example, we want your website to rank on google search. This is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. People search for stuff everyday, if the topic is related to your business or offering you should be on the first page, easy right? Nope, this doesn't just happen, it takes work to earn Googles trust. Why are we talking about this? Getting SEO right the first time is one of cheapest ways to get online revenue for your business. Managing your SEO, takes a lot of time. So this is part of our premium service, unless you have a lot of time on your hands - it's best to outsource it. Apart of that, you will get detailed access to your website traffic stats - where you will learn, what type of person is clicking, who is buying, how much did they buy, where did they come from, what keywords are you ranking for and what ads are profitable. The intersection of marketing and software is kind of our thing.

Step Seven: Finished. You made it! What now?

What do the following all have in common? Website / Webapp / App / Ecommerce store. They all take time to build. They take time to plan. They take time to create and they take at least a few months to see some traction on Google Search. It doesn't hurt that we are using Googles private fiber lines. The same system that delivers the search results also delivers your service. This process takes time. The faster we can get to know each other, the faster we can start planning out your ideas and the faster we can turn those ideas into networth. Send us a message, before another month goes by. The fastest way to answer those pricing questions is to talk to a real person.

Mike Hall - 020.412.85851